4 Big Benefits of Retailers Sharing POS Data with Supply Chain Partners

Adapt or die, they say. Keeping up with rapidly changing industry trends is the name of the game in most industries, but it’s particularly challenging in the retail realm.

Consumer preferences change seemingly overnight, buying behaviors become more unpredictable, and new products flood the market making it difficult for manufacturers to figure out what products and how much of them to make. To keep pace, supply chain partners — retailers, vendors, and manufacturers — have individually begun fully embracing the Big Data movement in hopes of gaining a competitive advantage.

But like many things data-related, silos always seem to diminish the value of that information and retailers are quickly realizing that keeping insights confidential and not enriching or cross-referencing the findings with data from other supply chain partners limits the usefulness of those insights.

Instead, forward-thinking retailers are eagerly seeking new ways to share data and knowledge to gain a 360-view of the entire supply chain that drives more sales, minimizes time-on-shelf, and protects against out-of-stock or excessively overstocking.

Despite the obvious advantages to sharing POS data, challenges remain. It’s easy for retailers to guard their findings out of a desire to keep the competition in the dark. But hiding that information can come at the expense of their sales partners.

For example, retailers have an intimate understanding of the products they sell and what flies off their shelves, versus the ones that languish for weeks or months. Similarly, suppliers may have knowledge of stock levels not reflected in the information accessible to retailers, creating an information gap that could inhibit both partners’ success.

Additional Constraints Retailers Face

Of course, there are a number of reasons beyond sheer unwillingness that retailers don’t share their information.

• Most retailers lack the appropriate technology to centrally store and easily distribute data. Many still rely on manual tools such as Excel spreadsheets, PDF reports, and flat files that take an eternity to update, standardize, and share.

• Retailers don’t have the right analytics capabilities to identify the connection between customer demographics and transactional data. Manually creating analytics models is beyond most retailers’ core competencies and limited resources. Reporting from third-party point solutions provide superficial metrics and no way to turn those metrics into action.

• Data sharing isn’t an enterprise-wide mentality. When sharing data with retail and supply partners does happen, it’s usually confined to an individual or a single department instead of a company-wide effort. Without a top-down mandate to share information, sharing data becomes an afterthought and produces a supply chain of siloed partners and isolated stores of information.
• Many retailers and suppliers want to monetize their data. The easiest way to stave off requests for sharing data is charge for it. Many companies believe that the effort, time, and resources that went into collecting the data makes it a valuable asset that should also produce revenue. But businesses — particularly supply chain partners — feel they already have high enough cost of doing business and aren’t willing to pay for information, despite its obvious value.